Back in March, I first wrote about the awesomeness that is Etsy’s very own Team Librarian. To refresh your memory: they’re a group of librarians, archivists, and just plain book lovers who are also craft mavens.

So I’m a team member now, even though I don’t make or sell anything…yet. (I’ve been toying with the idea of selling some of my art as well as items from my small vintage and designer purse collection as a way to get spending money…for books. You know me!) FYI: You can join the team too!

This weekend, July 30th and 31st, they’ll be selling their handcrafted wares at the Maker Faire in Detroit at a sweet discount. It’s not too late to buy tickets, denizens of the Motor City! Just click on the image below! A one-day pass is $28, or you can attend both days for $48. (Even cheaper if you are a member of The Henry Ford Museum!) Not too bad, considering the access to so many crafters and the exclusive event-only discounts they’ll be offering to Maker Faire Detroit attendees!

Here is the complete list of vendors who will be featured at the official Team Librarian table in Detroit:

But the best part of all this hoopla is that Team Librarian has made sure that you don’t have to go all the way to Michigan to enjoy the sale. I know, aren’t we just the best?! Just type in the promo code “MAKERFAIRE” to enjoy 15% off all Etsy Team Librarian goodies (including sweet vintage items not on display at the main event). Etsy is set up so that you can only check out with one vendor at a time, so please note that you will have to re-enter the code if you choose to buy from multiple TL-affiliated shops.

(Photo Credit: All of the gorgeous Etsy Team Librarian logos seen above are courtesy of the inimitable punk rock librarian Lisa Rabey, whose Etsy shop Excessively Diverting specializes in what she terms “novel accessories.” God, I love a good pun! … Additional kudos to her for making sure I got the abundance of information in this post correct.)

I have to say, I’m kind of getting into this whole Tumblr Photo Blog thing. It’s brought some really cool bookish nerdy things to my attention that might have otherwise escaped, like this really cool tidbit that makes me nostalgic for my childhood…

Nathan Sawaya did Patience first, just as the other guy did. You know, Edward Clark Potter, the sculptor who did the lions in front of the New York Public Library, on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street.

Mr. Sawaya is the artist commissioned to make copies of the lions, which have been lionized — sorry, we typed that word without thinking and groaned as loudly as you did — ever since they took their places 100 years ago. The anniversary of their dedication is Monday.

He has copied other landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Washington Monument and the United States Capitol. He has also done a giant BlackBerry smartphone and a 77-inch-tall sculpture called “Red-Headed Man” that looks like Conan O’Brien.

Mr. Sawaya’s medium is Lego blocks. “Some artists use paint, others use bronze,” he said by way of explanation. He said he had more than 1.5 million Lego “bricks” in his studio on Lexington Avenue and “another few million” in a storage center outside the city, “just in case.”

The lions reduced Mr. Sawaya’s inventory by 60,000. The color is “just a standard gray,” he said.

“This was a special challenge,” he said. “The lions are so iconic. Everyone who lives in the city has walked past those lions at some point, so there’s this challenge of doing them justice.

“If I’m creating a free-form piece of art, I can make it look like anything I want and nobody will say it’s wrong. But here, I have to make sure it looks right. There was definitely some pressure there.”

The lions are Patience on the downtown side of the library’s front steps and Fortitude on the uptown side. The library says Potter made Patience first, in clay. Then he created Fortitude. Then the lions were carved out of marble at the Piccirilli Studio in the Bronx.

“When he was doing the originals, it was a different type of sculpting,” Mr. Sawaya said. “It was subtractive. He started with stone and chipped away until he had the lions. What I was doing was additive, taking small pieces of plastic and adding until I got something that looked like lions.”

Potter delivered larger-than-life lions.

“Mine are 5 feet 2 1/2 inches long, exactly half the size” of the marble originals, Mr. Sawaya said. “I thought if I went for a full-size scale, I wouldn’t make the deadline. Plus, they have to get through my studio door. They weren’t going to make it if they were full size.”

Unlike Potter, Mr. Sawaya did not bring in a lion tamer as a consultant.

I’m a fan of JK Rowling. And as such, I’ve seen a lot of fan art. Some of it good, but most of it bad. Which I guess is sort of the problem with the mass appeal of the series. (I admit it, I’m an elitist. So sue me!)

Do you think, maybe, in the case of the later books, that the covers give too much of the plot away? Because I’m looking at them now, like with the time-turner… And I feel like maybe I could only love these covers having read the books first. If I saw these images before reading the books, I’d probably be disappointed. What do all of you readers — err…one of you, maybe, if I’m lucky — think about that?

It’s unfortunate that the copyright issues mean we can’t all buy prints of these. (Although why this applies to Harry Potter books and not to say, the movie poster redesigns featured on the brilliant Reelizer website, I have not a clue. Paging a copyright librarian! Help me understand the difference!)

And finally, if you’re curious… MS Corley has also worked his magic on other popular book series, including the Spiderwick Chronicles and the works of Lemony Snicket. Check it out.